That’s the question raised by Andrew J. Coulson in a post at the CATO Institute blog.

He makes an excellent point in that the internet gives us access to pretty much… everything.

If you wanted a liberal arts education in 1499, you were probably out of luck. But, if you happened to be a 0.01 percenter, you might have been able to saddle up the horse and ride to Oxford or Cambridge. Because that’s where the books were. Books didn’t generally come to you, you had to go to them.

Today, every one of us has more works of art, philosophy, literature, and history at our fingertips than existed, worldwide, half-a-millennium ago. We can call them up, free or for a nominal charge, on electronic gadgets that cost little to own and operate. Despite that fact, we’re still captives to the idea that a liberal arts education must be dispensed by colleges and must be acquired between the ages of 19 and 22.

But the liberal arts can be studied without granite buildings, frat houses, or sports venues. Discussions about great works of literature can be held just as easily in coffee shops as in stadium-riser classrooms—perhaps more easily. Nor is there any reason to believe that there is some great advantage to concentrating the study of those works in the few years immediately after high school—or that our study of them must engage us full-time. The traditional association of liberal arts education and four-year colleges was already becoming an anachronism before the rise of the World Wide Web. It is now a crumbling fossil.

Handing colleges tens of thousands of dollars—worse yet, hundreds of thousands—for an education that can be obtained independently at little cost, would be tragically wasteful even if the college education were effective. In many cases, it is not. Research by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa reveals that almost half of all college students make no significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, or written communication after two full years of study. Those are skills that any liberal arts education should cultivate. Even among the subset of students who linger for four years at college, fully one-third make no significant gains in those areas.

You get out of a liberal arts education college exactly what you make if it. For most liberal arts students, it’s nothing.

Much of school is learning how to learn. The wisest students understand that early on, and take on any scholastic challenge if for no other reason than the sake of the challenge. Those people will do fine in any profession they seek to be in.

Other liberal arts students will have to learn this from scratch. For them, their time in college was an expensive waste.

My son today is 21 y/o working as an engineer at a valve manufacturing plant in, believe it or not, in New England. He’s an RPI grad, having graduated at 20. At his birth I realize that I, his dad, would have to do the heavy lifting of home schooling. I refuse, in the early 1990s, to send him to the public schools.

while H/S did take a lot of input time, the substance of it all wasn’t hard. For the first year I focused on teaching him to read, using of course Blumenfeld/d Alphaphonics. After that it was arithmetic, arithmetic, arithmetic.

A few years with arithmetic laid the groundwork for algebra, algebra 2, trig, pre-calc, and calc.

He aced everything. I hate the public schools and their unions, Would do it all over again.

College should be more than just “learning how to learn.” That is a skill that should have been MASTERED before the student has been graduated from High School. That is has not is a failure of the High School setting trying to be all things to all people.

College should be about learning specialization in a field. Not necessarily mastery of the field or creation of knowledge (as those are the functions of Master’s and Ph.D. level courses), but sufficient knowledge to competently lead others in the field in the industrial or business setting.

The only benefit of a “liberal arts” degree is a foundation to go on to doing some sort of Professional Degree, such as Law, Accounting or now Teaching (Medicine, the third original professional degree now requires a Science degree) or as a foundation to proceed to Master’s level courses or Ph.D. Courses.